Two Bright, Particular Stars
by Ell Bee Someone Else Now
Summary: Getcher lukewarm xenophilia here! Lukewarm xenophilia! Also Ratchet and Wheeljack! Lukewarm xenophilia!
1. Chapter 1

Ratchet plays interspecies Cupid, but finds challenges therein he did not expect.

**Warnings**: Sentient beings of varied species make love. The word "nigger" is used for purposes of Ratchet's education. My beta, Buckeye Belle, tells me I should also caution you not to drink and read. (This warning brought to you by Mothers and Others Against Snorting Dr. Pepper Out Your Nose.)

Also, Buckeye Belle's input has made this a better fic than it otherwise might have been. Any remaining errors are solely my own.

Some chapters will be much longer than others.

Thanks to Willie the Shake for "bright, particular star."

As ever, I'm mixing my realities here, specifically DOTM and G1. So this is solidly AU.

Not mine, not for profit.

* * *

><p>Ratchet, in his office in the medbay, shuttered twice at Optimus Prime. "You <em>what<em>?"

Optimus' energon system deflected more circulation into the cooling fins on either side of his faceplates: he blushed. But it was he who had opened the discussion by saying, "Director Mearing and I would like your help on a personal matter."

Ratchet's response to that had been, first, "What kind of personal matter?" and second, upon definition of said matter, the famous "You _what_?" compounded of equal parts disdain and disbelief: the two-word Question of Destruction feared by Autobots everywhere. (See: spark-split twins.)

Now, facial fins flaming, Optimus said, "Ratchet, Charlotte Mearing and I ..."

Apparently, he could get no further through the sentence than that. But Ratchet, who was a medic, very much the elder of Optimus Prime, and not at all shy on top of it, said, "You," to his Prime, "and Charlotte Mearing. Who, last time I checked, wasn't Cybertronian."

"She still isn't," said Optimus. Perfectly straight-faceplated.

Ratchet said nothing, and stared at his Prime (who continued to redden) until the possibility of some other action prodded a few processor relays. Then the medic turned to his locked desk drawer, and broke out the high-grade.

Not merely any old high-grade, nor even any old well-aged high-grade, but the stuff that had been distilled at about the same time Mearing's species learned to brew beer.

He filled three cubes, not politely three-quarters up but to the rim, and sealed the tops. Then he drank half the remainder from the neck of the bottle, and passed it to Optimus, saying, "Finish this."

Ratchet wiped his mouthplates, and felt the sweet fire trail all the way down into his spark. He pushed the three sealed cubes across to Optimus as the Prime lowered the now-empty bottle.

Ratchet said, "Take two of these and comm me in the morning. _If_, when you've sobered up, you still want to investigate this, take the third as hair of the turbofox that bit you, and comm me. We'll talk."

The Prime looked hard at Ratchet, evaluating his expression. Then, because among other things Optimus was a master tactician, he collected the cubes, rose, and departed: went to his quarters, and followed his doctor's orders.

To the letter, as it turned out. The turbofox bit hard.

* * *

><p>In the morning, however, it was not Optimus Ratchet saw first, but Charlotte Mearing who walked into his med bay fairly early in his workday, which meant very early in her own.<p>

"Director," he said politely, sorting and organizing bolts as tall as she was. "How may I help you?"

"I'm not sure, Ratchet. May we have a closed-door discussion?"

"Certainly." Courteously, he lowered his hand, and she stepped onto it.

Once the door was closed, he was seated at his desk, and she herself seated on an elevated chair accessible from the desk, Mearing said, "Just before Chicago, I had a cancer scare."

Ratchet's browplates took flight.

Mearing shrugged. "It turned out to be nothing. But I had a very bad three months of constant retests, while I worried that it _wasn't_ 'nothing.' I also knew that if it was bad, there was little I could do about it except seek treatment, and hope. It clarified a great number of things for me."

Ratchet pinched his noseplates between two digits, and vented. "Director," he said, sounding tired, "there are certain key personnel we Autobots work with on whose health I keep constant tabs. You're one of them. I assure you, I would have come to you immediately with that news, and probably with better treatment options than human allopathic or alternative medicine can now provide, if I had seen anything that roused my concern."

"You don't ask permission to scan us?"

Ratchet smiled, being a wily old fish who was swimming in the shark-infested seas of Cybertronian politics while Mearing's ancestors were busy developing alphabets. "For critical personnel, I maintain a watch. My processor is set to compare the latest - call it a glance, it's pretty focused, and not a full scan - with those of three, six, nine, and twelve months previously. If I find something that should be looked at, I ask permission to scan. If the subject doesn't wish me to, I tell them why and how I became concerned, so that they can pursue it or not. It is the right of all sentient beings to be free, and equally their right to be idiots if they must."

Mearing did not laugh, but her expression might have lightened a bit behind the formidable glasses. "I see. I also can't argue with your conclusion, Ratchet."

"Mmm. When did you get the bad news?"

"Three days before Chicago. I had to put aside my concern for my own well-being, and Optimus and I worked in close contact for very long hours for a very long time to put that battle behind us. I fought for your presence on this planet, thought I'd lost, and then learned that I hadn't lost at all. By the time I found that I'd nothing to be concerned about regarding my own health ..." she shrugged. "Optimus and I were both exhausted. He was healing from grievous battle damage as well. When it hit us ... we were working on the same problem, on the phone with different agencies, happened to look up and catch one another's glance, and there it was. For both of us."

"Well," Ratchet said, and left the single word there, to die a lonely death.

Mearing took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "Ratchet, Optimus and I ... we'd like to see if our friendship could include physical closeness as well."

Ratchet sighed, and opened That Drawer again. He extruded a pair of tweezers from one finger, and used them to pick up a bottle of Scotch and set it on the table by her chair. Two glasses, one almost the capacity of the full bottle, followed.

"Will you be mother?" he said to Mearing.

For answer, she filled the larger glass, retaining for herself only a stiff double, and pushed it across. Then she poured and knocked back about half her own drink; the Dickens with eight o'clock of a fine, sunny morning. It's five o'clock somewhere.

"That's really good," she said. She turned the bottle, read the label, and said, "My God, it's as old as I am! It's aged better, though."

"That's always puzzled me," Ratchet said, having had a polite liter-and-a-half sip. "You humans have such a revulsion for your elderly, and specifically for your elderly femmes."

"Oh," said Mearing, relaxing a bit, "that's from the sixties. It doesn't really go back any further than that, the ageism, I mean. Unfortunately the sexism is far older and more pervasive."

"Hmm. I'll have to read some more social history."

"Try reading literature. It takes for granted the attitudes of its moment. Try some Dorothy Sayers mysteries. They'll show you the biases rampant, and accepted, throughout the first two-thirds of the last century."

"That's a good idea, Director, I'll look into it. Thank you. It seems though that _I_ have gotten off-track. Let me run through a list of problems you and Optimus would be facing. Scale, for one, and not in ways you might expect. You won't be able to lock optics while you make love, but that's the least of the issues. The range of his pelvic thrust at orgasm probably exceeds your own height."

"So he'd drive his penis, which is of course made of metal, right through my brain."

"His spike, yes. Your body would probably split along the midline to accommodate it before that happens."

"Very well, you've made your point. And?"

Hmmm. That hadn't worked. Ratchet hadn't expected girlish squeals of terror from Mearing, but he did think – he would not say "hope" even to himself – that a graphic description might have put her off.

"Okay. Next up, overcharge, what you would call orgasm, is for us an electrical event."

"Us too," Mearing said with a very small smile.

Ratchet almost returned it. "Director, you wouldn't survive the voltage or wattage it entails. Either one with a minimum of the other would be very uncomfortable for you. And neither are anywhere near minimum, with us."

"So, let's see. Thus far I'd be split, brain-dead, and fried. What's next?"

Mearing was ex-CIA, and Ratchet knew a few among his own people who performed that function: Mirage, for instance, was as amoral, and practical, a Cybertronian as ever ambulated, and Jazz had been too. But this was his first deep conversation with a human of that subspecies.

And, like Mearing, "Bring It" was never far from either Cybertonian's lip plates. If someone Brought It, Mearing knew she could Return It With Postage Due. She probably held the title of world's hardest ass.

Hardest squishy ass, anyway. Optimus', of course, was made of metal. Otherwise it would be a dead heat.

Ratchet thought for a moment. "I can't speak for Optimus in this matter," he said eventually, "so you will have to talk to him about it. But you cannot spark-merge or hardline with him; these are the sources of our greatest emotional satisfaction during sex. What you do together will always be limited to physical gratification. For your species, that seems to be enough, or perhaps the maunderings I read concerning sex are indicative that it generates other events for you as well."

"It does," Mearing said. "Again, I'll refer you to our literature."

Ratchet rather thought that on the whole he'd prefer to talk to Seymour Simmons, but he was too wise, and too kind, to say that out loud. "Ask Optimus to translate some of Carbure of Praxus' poetry for you, or perhaps Farspeed's. They're widely regarded as two of our finest poets. That'll give you some idea of what you're missing, and what he'd be missing as well."

"Very well. Will you e-mail me those names?"

There was an infinitesimal pause. "Done."

"Thank you. Cybertronians have in the past used holographic projections."

"Yes. They're constructed of light. Here's mine. Shake hands with it."

Mearing's hand passed right through Ratchet's, and the projection dissolved.

"Very well," she said. "What about hardlight?"

Ratchet's helm tilted to one side, and his optics narrowed. "Where did you learn about that?"

"Ratchet, I was given twenty thousand pages of material to read and absorb when I accepted this position. It was in there somewhere. I no longer remember the source citations."

"Mmm. E-mail them to me, please, when you find them. Well, here's my hardlight projection. Shake hands with this one too."

Mearing did, and got the kind of shock that comes from walking across a large nylon-carpeted room in leather-soled shoes when the air is very dry.

Perhaps that was appropriate, as she had no intention of wading through those 20K pages again. But the thought occurred that it would keep that one among her hapless assistants whom she liked least both busy and away from her for an indefinite period ...

Ratchet said, "If you'd like a further demonstration, I suggest we french-kiss, as that will be roughly comparable to contact with the moister, more private mucous membranes."

A very busy four seconds later, Mearing moved away. "So that's what electricity tastes like," she said thoughtfully. "I can't see that leading to an orgasm."

"Possibly not," said Ratchet. "It didn't do much for me, either." (Reformatting one's own tongue on the fly usually does not.)

"All right, so that's out. Let's talk Earth-style robotics. Is there any way to construct something that one of us could ride in or on, or drive, or whatever the appropriate verb would be?"

"Let me think about that. –Are you willing to put up with some fairly intrusive arrangements?"

"Ratchet, every damn' year I have a Pap smear and a mammogram. Next question."

The medic frowned in thought, his eyes much farther away than the walls of his office. "It would be easiest," he said, "to construct a human-sized simulacrum for Optimus. Uses fewer raw materials. The tradeoff is the size of the fine components: creating those will be fairly fiddly work, but First Aid can do that."

"Yes, and I am afraid that if you constructed a body a human could transfer consciousness to, it would kick over quite a few ethical and religious beehives."

Ratchet researched beehives, kicking them over, the subsequent behavior of the bees involved, and last the effects of bee stings upon human beings before this made sense. "More trouble than it's worth?" he ventured, brow plates wrinkled.

"Much more trouble. So much trouble that I'm afraid of that much trouble. The president would very likely make it an order to cease and desist, and I would have to pass that order on to you."

"Really? Then I had better confine myself to a simulacrum for Optimus, although the possibility of the other fascinates me."

Mearing said only, "So, how would you link the simulacrum to Optimus' nervous system?"

"Handwavium."

"Handwavium?" Mearing felt no need to read science fiction, the source of this term, since she was living it.

"Yes. Meaning I know how, but I don't want to share."

Mearing gave him a genuine smile. Since it didn't affect security, she would respect Ratchet's secret. "Well," she said, rising, "thank you for your time. I think I'll go talk to Optimus about this. We'd discussed it, but we wanted your input."

"Talk to Smokescreen as well; he has acquired considerable accreditation in human psychology, and his understanding of our own psychology is really quite wide. I'm going to suggest seeing Smokey to Optimus too, next time I see him. When I gave the Prime my input last night," Ratchet said, offering her his hand, "I wasn't terribly encouraging, but you may tell him you changed my mind."

"Really? I'm flattered. Thank you."

"Don't thank me until we get there. And to be frank, Director, I continue to think this is the worst idea I've been presented with in many a long vorn."

"Why is that?" she said, clutching his thumb.

"A mating between a Cybertronian and a human would never happen in nature. Therefore, it's an unnatural act," Ratchet said with finality. "I give you my word that I will do my best to resolve the issues for you, but I find the idea distasteful."

"I see," said Mearing. They had reached the doors to med bay, and she stepped delicately off his palm. She wondered if, when she got done being affronted by that statement, she should send Ratchet to the first available sensitivity training. But she would need to think about it; she knew herself well enough to be aware that she wanted to do so right now only because she was a) really quite angry and b) not tall enough to kick his skidplate.

And she was not going to go talk to a _shrink_. She wasn't crazy.

Well, wait a minute. She liked, to the point of "considering having sex with," a thirty-foot-tall non-organic being from another galaxy, who was only considered "male" because English didn't have the concepts, let alone the pronouns, to encompass what "he" really was.

Okay, she _was_ crazy. But she still wasn't going to go see no damn' shrink.

"Well, our plans means that Optimus has to spend time being fiddled with. I know how much I enjoy that; I don't imagine he likes it any better."

Ratchet snorted. "Director, you have no idea how much trouble I take to give my Prime good memories when he needs my help. He won't have a problem with it, not with any of it, thanks to euphoric sedatives."

"Ratchet," said a shocked Mearing, "you're a monster."

He bowed to her from the waist. "A monster from outer space, madam Director, at your service."


	2. Chapter 2

"Oh, the euphoric sedatives? I knew about them, actually."

Optimus and Charlotte were lunching together. That is, she was getting on the outside of a rather good Indian meal, seated at the elevated table on his desk, and he was having a cube of energon. Their respective staffs had been told they were having a working lunch, but without discussing it the two principals had channeled the mid-shift hour into personal talk.

"How did you find out?" Charlotte said.

Optimus smiled at her. "Everybot gets scanned randomly. Originally, I instituted that policy to prevent usage of a recreational drug produced by the Decepticons, for fear of poisoning. And, you know."

"Yes," Charlotte said calmly, "I do know. I'm picturing Sideswipe on drugs as we speak."

Optimus laughed, and continued, "He's settling down a bit. It would actually have been a lot worse when he was younger. – When the usage logs for euphoric sedatives didn't match the inventory, Prowl talked to Ratchet about it, and Ratchet told him that he would talk to me about it, but not to anyone else, for reasons of medical confidentiality." Optimus sighed. "The next time the scans were scheduled - Prowl does that - I added Ratchet's name and my own to the list of personnel to be scanned. My scan was positive for the sedatives, and Ratchet's was negative, which I took as proof positive they'd been used on me, and kept secret for that reason." He twiddled his cup in his large fingers. "I had a managerial chat with him afterward. Ratchet's only shortcoming is that he truly feels he knows what is best to do, and sometimes doesn't bother to inform the rest of us what that is, or tell us that it is going to be done to us."

Charlotte paused with a forkful of samosa halfway to its destination, looking very thoughtful. "Well, that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? His administration of drugs without his patient's permission in situations that cannot be argued to be medical necessity. You might choose to tell him that if he ever does something like that with NEST personnel or dependents, and it's discovered, he will wake up dead one morning, and we'll never find out who did it."

"I will certainly pass that warning along to him." Optimus sighed. "That aside, he did give both of us his word to do his best to help us, and I know him to be an honorable 'bot who will do what he says. In the meantime, however," Optimus said, gently taking her hand into his very large one, "perhaps we should concentrate on what we can, instead of what we cannot, be to one other ... my bright, particular star."

No human male had ever quoted Shakespeare to Charlotte Mearing. She might be crazy but she was going through with it.

Who wouldn't, after being called that?

When the medbay was quiet, being for once unpopulated, and he was in his office at the end of his shift, Ratchet brought out his other bottle of really well-aged high-grade. He took a leisurely sip, letting it evaporate from his glossa just as it should, and thought.

Optimus had been alone in the romantic sense since he had last seen Elita. Was this liaison with Mearing so wrong, then? All the mech wanted was a little comfort. And really, Mearing was not what he expected. He didn't know her well, but who she showed herself to be in relation to this - issue, problem, Pit-spawned Bad Idea - had reassured Ratchet. Optimus would not be regretful, he was fairly sure, even if they called it off after attempting to be intimate. Failure might terminate the relationship, but both were professional.

Very well, then, Ratchet. You get to take your ideas about these squishies out and examine them. Because you lied to Charlotte Mearing. You don't object to an act that would never take place in nature, you object to the fact that these squishies are always squishy. They're never quite totally dry on the outside, and once you get inside, they're even wetter.

And with sex ... you get inside.

They are also run by chemical processes which are almost random, and which influence their thinking in illogical ways far more frequently than they know.

_Mating _with one of the wet, crazy things? Gack. Optimus must have the ability to see the spark, and not its casing.

Ratchet couldn't, being so intimately involved with the maintenance of the casing as he was, and knew it.

He settled for the view of eternity available in a bottle of high-grade, and imagined that the problems of scale had been resolved. It took the strongest intraprocessor handwavium he had to make that one work, and it gave him some good ideas as well.

He returned to the problem at servo, and tried some interspecies sex-fantasy on for size, with frequent reference to the 'net until he got a handle on things, as it were.

After that ... none of your business, squishy.

His conclusion was that maybe this was not morally wrong, though it was certainly not his cube of energon.

Still: Optimus was considering mating with a wet, crazy thing. Gack.

CHAPTER BREAK

"It hurt like the Pit the first time you did it," Optimus said. "Tell me why we have to do it again?"

"Because it hurt like the Pit the first time," Ratchet said. "That pulled all the ciliae out, and they spoiled the mold. With them gone, it won't hurt." The medic paused. "Or at least, it won't hurt so much."

Optimus watched his medic apply mold release gel, and then casting compound, all around Optimus' own spike with great trepidation. Since it had to be erect to mold correctly, said medic had carefully applied both the sexual equivalent of a euphoric (non)sedative, and then said medic's very own servos, in some ways that Optimus wasn't going to think about for fifty or sixty vorn. If ever.

The first time, the medic had handed the Prime a car calendar, and told him to think dirty thoughts. It worked too, but only for the first time.

This second time, the result of Ratchet's endeavors was stood proudly to attention: three and one-quarter feet long, tapering, and silvery, its overlapping scales delicately engraved.

Gravure was a rite of passage every Cybertronian (no matter the gender of the English pronoun adopted) underwent upon achieving majority. A few engraved the outer parts of the valve as well, although this was considered something only the wild children did. Sideswipe's gravures, for example, were both extremely extensive and particularly beautiful, having been designed by his brother.

The ciliae that were presently giving both Ratchet and the Prime fits were actually small long sensors. They provided an exquisite sensitivity which was pretty much useless elsewhere except the valve, where they were much shorter, occurring in their longeurs only on the spike, and in the short version on the fingertips (First Aid had them, having been sparked a medic. Ratchet sometimes envied him that).

The Prime had undergone the equivalent of a Brazilian wax when they were removed, and now he was having another.

"Here," Ratchet said, and unsubspaced a human/Autobot use datapad, much lighter and with smaller buttons than an Autobot-only pad. Optimus had to stay ha - to remain ere - to _stand at attention_ for at least five breem for the cast to set correctly, and the medic had been up all darkorn Photoshopping for his Prime to ensure that this would be accomplished.

Optimus opened the datapad, and it proved to be Charlotte Mearing, Photoshopped indeed: the faceplates were based on Mearing's bone structure, but the rest of her had been rendered Cybertronian. As Optimus watched, she smiled at him, and opened her chestplates to reveal her spark. He had to concentrate to find the button to push to get her to do it again.

Ratchet smirked at the sensors attached to the cast. Yep, that was working.

"Charlotte? I have those translations for you." Optimus laid a datapad on the table of the quarters (his) they now shared. Time was going by, they agreed, Charlotte had less of that commodity at her command than did Optimus, and even if they couldn't you know, or at least they couldn't you know yet, they wanted to spend all the time they could together.

She neither invited nor responded to comments about the new direction her walk home each night lay in; it was the 'bots, anyway, not the humans, who noticed that there was a human energy signature consistently present in Optimus' quarters.

"Oh? Thank you, Optimus." Charlotte smiled, and picked up the dual-species datapad, which weighed about a tenth of the Autobot-only device.

The klaxon formerly used for Megatron's more outlandish attempts at interaction chose that particular moment to go off.

Mearing picked up her phone and leapt to Optimus' offered hand after his other datapad hit the table. They were out the door in seconds.

Two human hours later, they returned, individually, Mearing making a stop at her office to pick up a ream or so of moneythink, Optimus detouring to med bay to get a slight wound seen to. Thus, it was she who got back first.

She sat down, sighed, and picked a datapad, intending to begin her acquaintance with Cybertronian love poetry. But when she opened it, her own face, under Cybertronian plating, smiled back at her, and the simulacrum opened its chestplates, baring the spark.

She set Optimus' pad down with an extremely thoughtful expression.

Charlotte Mearing had known for a long time that no human male would ever call her "beautiful." But this person, for he, like all Cybertronians, was a person, this Optimus? He apparently thought that of her.

He'd read some of the poetry he translated to her, annotating as he went. She knew the significance of parting the chestplates.

Charlotte Mearing, whom Optimus Prime found beautiful for reasons that reflected onto, rather than were caused by, her physical shell, wiped her eyes.

After a while, she picked up the second datapad, and began to read Optimus Prime's translations of the love poetry of Farspeed of Cybertron. The damn' budget could wait.


	3. Chapter 3

Charlotte Mearing walked into Ratchet's domain the next morning with a thick pile of green accordion-folded paper in her hands.

Ratchet's spark sank. They were going to have the dreaded Budget Discussion.

But when Charlotte caught sight of Optimus Plastercaster in his corner, she stopped, dead, and said, "What's that? It looks like a really hi-tech version of a Christmas tree, but you don't celebrate that holiday. Very beautiful. – And it's a little early for it, anyway, in August."

"Oh," said Ratchet very carefully, "it isn't a Christmas tree."

"Ah. Well, it's a really beautiful piece of art. Wish I had one. Ratchet, I just dropped by to tell you that you were under budget by five percent last quarter. Since I work for the government, I have to warn you that failing to spend all your money might result in forfeiting some of it."

Ratchet pointed at her, and said calmly, "You people are insane."

"Ratchet, this is just plain old vanilla bureaucrat-squirrelly. You haven't _seen_ insane yet."

When she was gone, the human door firmly closed behind her, Ratchet thought about the various spectra of squirrelly-to-insane, contemplated their exploitation for profit, and then commed Sunstreaker.

::You have contacts in the art world. How difficult would it be to get something manufactured to sell to humans?::

::Not difficult at all. Let me get the information together and I'll comm you with it.::

And this is how the Autobots came to make quite a large amount of money, which did not have to be accounted for since it wasn't government funds, selling works of art which were based upon their leader's penis.

Sunstreaker looked at the original work of art, or perhaps artifice; Ratchet refused point-blank to tell him what it was, which of course he could identify at a glance, or whose it continued to be. Sunstreaker listened to his description of Charlotte's reaction to it, researched what humans liked about Christmas trees (proportion of height to girth at various points and density of branches, mostly: with added greenness and that lovely tree smell), stumbled upon the fact that most humans didn't much care to display a giant alien penis, even if it's called it a "spike," in a corner of the living room, nor to display it permanently as art: or rather, that the number of humans who would knowingly do this was vanishingly small, and could not reasonably be said to constitute a market. The majority also did not care to dangle an alien penis or two from holes deliberately punched into extraneous flesh around the audial receptors.

Therefore the yellow 'bot did some more research into what the Greeks had discovered about beauty, still the culture's defining standards, and made trifling adjustments here and there according to the Golden Mean. _Et voilá_! Optimus was no longer model but inspiration.

The faux-penii ranged in size from earrings an inch and a half (four centimeters) long to behemoths eight feet (two and most of a third meters, the size of the prototype given the NEST personnel as a holiday decoration) high, and were made of various metals or even carved of stone, which required Wheeljack to invent a three-dimensional stone saw. So he was happy too, even if it failed to blow up after the first two trial runs.

The resulting works of art were at a disadvantage to real trees in one dimension, the lack of lovely scent, but had an undeniable advantage in another: they did not shed needles all over the carpet.

When online marketing began in early October, both the earrings and the faux-trees were a sensation. Paperweights and sculptures sized for the home or the garden followed, and mopped up their competition as well.

One art critic survived interviewing Sunstreaker, as almost unanimously, his colleagues went just a wee tiny bit batshit insane with praise for the Autobot's work. In the art world, Optimus' spike was widely regarded as the best thing since sliced bread ... if slightly more difficult to toast and butter.

Ratchet could only hope that Mearing would share their opinion. Although if she wanted toast and butter to be part of the equation, she could solve that problem for herself.

Instead of Optimus' beautiful gravures, however, all the models of every size bore Sunstreaker's signature glyph, a work of art in itself.

And thank Primus for that small difference, because come December, Optimus did not recognize an intimate part of himself rigidly at attention in the corner of the common room, sporting bright-red Christmas balls.

* * *

><p>Ratchet was not liking his numbers. He knew he needed miniature circuit boards, he knew how many of them he needed, and he knew how long it took him to produce one. By the time he was finished with this very small part of Operation Simulacrum, very likely Mearing would be dead.<p>

Notwithstanding her instructions in the _completely opposite_ direction, Ratchet had continued to do some thinking about how to create an artificial Cybertronian into which to decant a human. So far, he was liking the computer-model results. Maybe he could talk her into - no, he knew he couldn't.

Operation Simulacrum was from the other side of the size differential between humans and Cybertronians, an artificial human.

Well, her eventual death from old age was a way to resolve Ratchet's issues with Operation Simulacrum, which he continued to think of as The Bad Idea. The medic, however, would not stoop so low as to let Time fight his battles for him. The humans were short-lived as it was; no need to rub their faces (or any other parts of their anatomy) in it.

He went looking on the internet for solutions, and found the pick-and-place machine.

A fully-automated pick-and-place machine is a computer-controlled device which, given the materials, creates fully-functioning circuit boards from scratch. Pour the components into their bins, stack the circuit boards in theirs, program like crazy, and turn the machine on. Zink, zink, zoink, zoink, schlerazzle, zink-zoink. Seconds later, you have a completed circuit board.

Cost was an issue, though. Pick-and-places ran from $50,000 on up. The one he really needed, capable of tiny, complex work on miniature circuit boards, was estimated by several firms at $150K to $195K.

The highest-end machine could produce one board to his specs every six seconds. Ten a minute was fourteen thousand a day, which meant that it would take around three years to produce the boards he needed.

Three of the machines? Nine of them? Ratchet was impatient, since he had what amounted to the first draft completed: the prototype, to which improvements would still need to be made. Nine it was; they would complete the work in four months' time.

That cost, however, exceeded even the money-producing capabilities of Optimus' pe - spi - ah, _modeling career_. It certainly broke the bank for the budget given Ratchet's entire department for the year.

He scheduled a meeting with Optimus.


	4. Chapter 4

It was late at night before Ratchet left med bay to sulk over Optimus Prime's shocked refusal to fund a pick-and-place machine, let alone nine of them or about two million dollars' worth, "merely," as he'd said, "for my own enjoyment."

The place Ratchet headed for was not for humans. Ratchet had, for the moment, had it up to _there_ (a location he presently defined as "waaaay over the top of my helm") with humans. It was not, however, totally unknown to them.

Once upon a time, when Charlotte Mearing first drew the short straw to inspect the base top to bottom and had finished that task, she went to find Will Lennox.

"Director? How may I help you?" he'd said, stacking his weapon in the locker neatly, Epps right behind him, doing the same. The smell of cordite hung around them, olfactory marker of the firing range.

"I'm hoping you can, actually. In the bots' quarters there is excessive floor wear in a path leading to a wall panel, where a strong odor like that of gasoline is present. If that's a still for high-grade, do we need to request outside channels that it be moved?"

Epps and Lennox exchanged a glance. Then Epps cough-laughed into his fist, and said, "Excuse me, people, I've got to .. uh ... got to." He'd been backing away from them as he floundered into this un-sentence; then he pivoted and walked away, shoulders shaking.

Lennox smiled, said, "Let's go to the coffee room."

The coffee room was surveilled only by video, not audio.

Lennox looked at the coffee remaining in the urn, poured it down the sink (which was why the plumbing never gave them any trouble), and started another pot. "You found The Core Dump, Director."

"The Core Dump," she said, sitting at a table.

He joined her in the human-sized cheap plastic chairs, while the coffee maker burped and whistled in the background. "Yeah. 'Hide told me about it when I pulled inspection. I noticed what you did, and asked him about it. The Dump's a bar, and while it's not officially restricted, because it's not officially there, it's for Autobots only. Doesn't serve human drinks at all, no accommodations for anyone our size that isn't intended for minibots. Before you label that discriminatory, think about it from their point of view for a minute. They're surrounded by an extremely alien culture. They need to get away from us once in a while, and The Core Dump is the only place on base they can do that." He smiled. "Sometimes, you need to go where everybody knows your frame."

Charlotte Mearing had smiled at that. Ever after, if the traffic and the smell were noted in an inspection, she simply edited them out of the report.

Any legally adult human would have recognized the emotional atmosphere of The Core Dump the moment they got past the door, even through the stench of not-quite gasoline it emanated. It was a dive bar. Not a "gentleman's" or a "hospitality suite," certainly not a "club."

Well, come to think of it, possibly it was a club after all. A 'bot could certainly get hit over the head with, as well as at, The Core Dump.

The Core Dump was a place where 'bots came to addle their processors, and, processors duly addled, they were expected to pay up and leave. It was, after all, a short stagger home.

Most nights - The Core Dump did not open until all humans not on guard duty could reasonably be expected to be in recharge - Gears ran the place, and was there when Ratchet made it as far as the barstool next to Wheeljack.

Gears, knowing his customers, said simply, "Ratchet. Double or treble?"

The Core Dump served one product, and one product only: the twins' best triple-distilled high-grade, filtered through Herkimer diamonds - a human discovery, actually, but the twins weren't proud, they'd steal good ideas from anyone.

They had also managed to perfect a method of distillation which left little variation from batch to batch, and this made Ratchet extremely happy. No one needs to get blotto occasionally more than a medic, and the twins' consistent output was something upon which he could rely for help in that department.

"Treble, straight up, pressed shale-oil chaser with rubidium dusting on the side," Ratchet said. "Hey, Jack."

"Ratchet. I haven't seen you in about a decaorn. How're things with you?"

Ratchet knocked back a good slug of his drink, followed it with a sip of oil, and then a pinch of rubidium dusted onto his glossa. "Much better in just a moment," he said to Jack. "You?"

"Same old same old. My lab has a bit of slack right now, so it's hard to keep the humans assigned to me out of trouble. There isn't anything your department needs at the moment, is there?"

"Nine pick-and-place machines, high end, in a hurry."

There was a silence while Jack did a fair amount of internet research in the time that it took Ratchet to get one round farther into his Autobot margarita. Shot, oil, dust; savor and swallow. Then the inventor said, "I found plans for one. I'll build it, scan it as an alt-form, see what needs to be improved to get it to fulfill your requirements, and then get my staff to build nine iterations of the improved version for you. That will require about a week. Is that sufficiently timely for you?"

Ratchet swung his barstool to face the inventor, mouthplates agape. "Primus, Jack, that's a better solution than I dared hope for. But aren't the plans copyrighted?"

"No, they're copyright-free. I will never willingly infringe on another inventor's patent. The people who posted these plans accept donations, so my department will make one. Perhaps yours will too?"

Ratchet nodded. No "perhaps" about that one. He'd pay for it himself if he had to.

"The humans might still sue our socks off if they think they can prove a copyright infringement, though, so I'll research enough to make sure my solutions for improvements aren't parallel to theirs. Shouldn't be hard to come up with something different. The humans are pretty new to both metal and electrical technology; we know more than they do, so I've got more to work with. 'Course then I'll have to run it by Prowl and Red, see if it's okay to share; that way, we can make some money." Wheeljack had another hit off his own high-grade, and his optics became just that bit more shiny and purple, to match the drink.

Ratchet licked the rubidium off his fingers. "We don't wear socks," he pointed out, skipping all the important information in Jack's last statement. He didn't bother with the fancy bits this time, just slugged down the high-grade.

"Yes, so think how uncomfortable being denuded of them will be!" Jack gave him a very bright-and-shiny, if not purple, smile.

"Do you need budget allocationsh from my department?" Ratchet heard his own lisp and frowned. That oughtn't to be happening yet. Another hit, another dip into the oil, more rubidium. Yeah, that'd fixh it.

Wheeljack too had to make an effort to be lisp-less. "Fortunately not. I can justify the ex-shpense by leasing the machines to weapons contractors on base once you're done with 'em. They won't need all of them, so onshe (that one got by him) I've got the patents for my improvements secured, I'll license those machinesh, an' the deshignsh" – Wheeljack nearly wobbled off his barstool, and Ratchet caught him under one elbow – "to manufacturersh. Thanks. We'll make lotsh'a money 'f I do that."

Gears glided silently by and re-upped the medic's supply of high-grade by pouring most of a fifth into his cube from a five-gallon pail.

"Hey! Where'sh mine?" Wheeljack said.

"Cuttin' you off, Jack," Gears said. "I'll have to call Sunstreaker to help you home otherwise."

"No, no, don' call Shunshtreaker. Don' call Shideshwipe, neither."

"Give him another, Gearssss," Ratchet said, tossing money on the bar, proud that that ess, at least, had gotten out of his vocalizer without attracting an unwanted aitch, although it did seem to have cloned itself on the way by. "I'll geddim home."

"You will, huh? You're almost as pie-eyed as he is."

Ratchet simply stared the unpleasant minibot down. Gears shrugged, and poured Jack another.

"Sho why you need nine o' th' thingsh?" Jack's last drink disappeared with amazing speed.

"Can't tell you. S'medigly priv'lidjed-ed inf'mation." Ratchet finished the rubidium, drank the oil straight, and chased it with the high-grade. Tasted funny, as the cannibal said of the clown. Note to shelf, _self_, remember to do it the other way around nexht time. "It'll get shomebody laid, though."

"Ha! Shomebody's gettin' laid? S' pretty nice fer them, I guessh."

"Yeah, shure ish. Not fer ush, though. Not fer th' likesh uv ush."

"Iddon' haveta be that way," Jack said, sliding off his barstool and, after a certain amount of tap-dancing, remaining upright. "Sho don' be tha' tway."

Ratchet gave the inventor, who smiled at him, the Slow Blink of Intoxicated Stupidity, and said, "Doeshn't?"

"No, shilly, iddoeshn't. Come on. S' goda my quardersh. Nicer'n' yersh."

"Ishn't either. S'got inventionsh all over."

"Doeshn' have bitsh o'botsh ev'rywhere, though."

Ratchet made it upright and unsupported, and said, "S' righ'. Ye're righ'. No bitsh o' botsh. Lezgo your quardersh."

Indeed, there were no bits of 'bots present. Assured of this by a quick scan, Ratchet took the inventor in his arms, and kissed him rather thoroughly.

Jack returned the volley, but made a foot-fault. "Shorry," he said, taking his pede off Ratchet's.

"Don' be. I shtand on 'em too. C'mere, you."

Ratchet's next serve was long and hard, and barely stayed in-bounds. He pulled his helm back, adjusted his focus, and found that instead of kissing the inventor's mouth, he had his glossa in Jack's audial.

"Oooh," Jack said, nonetheless. "S' nishe." His fingers found a chink in Ratchet's shoulder armor that flared of its own accord, and rubbed the structures to be found within it.

Ratchet's optics crossed. Jack, approaching for another kiss, instead whacked Ratchet's forehead with his own, making them both stagger, and they committed a double foot-fault.

"Tell you wha'," Jack said, seizing Ratchet's servo, "'s goda m'berth. Won't be steppin' 'n 'chother's pedes there."

"Sure won'," Ratchet agreed," not'n yer berth. Known you long time, Jack, long time. Open yer ches'plates f'r me?"

"Oh yeah, long time. Sure, don' see why not. Don' see why not t'all. You too, huh?"

"'Course. S'no fun f'you do it 'lone."

And so, while not the direct cause (no sex tape was involved), this solution to the need for pick-and-place machines was the method by which Wheeljack and Ratchet's sex life eventually netted the Autobots quite a lot more than Optimus' Christmas tree did, balls and all.

Ratchet considered that a win for everyone, including himself and Jack. Finding that they had more in common than they first realized, the two Autobots didn't end their affair when they sobered up just because they started it while they were drunk.

Sources of wisdom vary so widely among the sentient species of the galaxies that, indeed, some _are_ filtered through Herkimer diamonds.


	5. Chapter 5

Please go back to chapter 3 and begin reading there. Occasionally, we learn by screwing up, and I learned that the chapters which look sufficiently lengthy on my computer are very short indeed on the site. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I didn't want to lose anyone's kind reviews.

* * *

><p>Ratchet, still troubled by his revulsion over the thought of Optimus and the squishy he held servos with having sex (although he would admit to fascination with the technical problems he was encountering), went to the firing range to blow things up. Ironhide had taught him, over the vorn, the value of cathartic detonation.<p>

He found Epps there, keeping his eye in. "Morning," the medic said shortly, and turned to his targets.

"Morning, Ratchet," Epps said, reloading.

Epps pushed the button to begin a test NEST personnel took at specific intervals. Since returning to the service, Epps had passed all of the entrance exams, so to speak, and now had only to keep up continuing assurances of competency.

He was also at the bottom of the acceptable grade of physical fitness, and this bothered Epps, who therefore spent a great deal of time running and lifting weights, as well as doing circuit training. (He also took his wife dancing quite often, which pleased them both, and may have contributed to his fitness as well.)

Bobby Epps was rather glad not to be Will's 2iC any longer. Being a grunt was good enough for him, so long as the grunting took place inside NEST.

In the test, various figures came out of the darkness and were visible for an extremely short period of time. Men, women, children, minibots, and the lower legs and pedes of full-sized bots all flashed in and out of a landscape; Epps was required to "tag" every minibot with red optics.

Ratchet saw something that piqued his own interest, but stayed quiet until the test was over. Epps got 97%, and though that was his highest score yet, said, "Dang it all to heck," or approximate thereto.

"Robert," said Ratchet, "may I ask you a question?"

"Probably," said Epps, folding his score printout, and putting into a BDU pocket.

Ratchet said, "Why did that test show mostly Negroid humans?"

Epps blinked. He hadn't noticed. "The test varies the background. Sometimes the population you see is Asian, sometimes Hispanic, sometimes African, sometimes Caucasian, sometimes a mix of any or all of those."

"I see. Does that background affect your scores?"

"Yeah. When I was 2iC I noticed that everybody got the best scores when the background contained people mostly of their own race."

"But that's a mere cosmetic difference. Why would it matter?"

Epps said thoughtfully, "I can't answer for anybody else, Ratchet. Me, I happened to be raised in a black neighborhood. I was eighteen years old before I had a white friend. To me, a white face is, on some level, alien. But it's pretty well known that each human race recognizes members of its own best. Mostly, that - difference in speed of perception, let's say - happens because those populations tend to segregate themselves."

"Why?"

"In the US it's cultural differences. The values ain't the same, and for Hispanics and us blacks the language ain't the same either. When I joined the Army all those years ago, I put in a lot of time learning to speak standard English, instead of what was taught me at home. Later on, I learned that my native tongue uses English words laid onto a grammatical structure used in African languages."

Ratchet grappled with this new information. "But ... most African Americans are not truly black. Why would you use that word to describe yourselves?"

"For a long time," Epps said thoughtfully, "the English word applied to people of my skin color, people originally from Africa, was 'Negro.' That's just a Spanish word for black, but it got corrupted into 'nigger,' which was used as an insult. So we left that word behind, and began calling ourselves what it meant, rather than what it had become."

"I see." Ratchet looked at him curiously; the intertubes had revealed to him that black people used the word "nigger" among themselves, but that its use by a white was still a deadly insult. He had another question, though. "Can you tell me why there is such a variation in skin tones among those who call themselves 'black'?"

Epps shrugged, and began to clean his sidearm. "There's naturally some range in skin color among blacks, just as there is among whites. But miscegenation had a lot more to do with it than that."

"Miscegenation? One parent of one race, the other of another?"

"Yeah. Interbreeding, not usually intermarriage until about fifty years ago, between blacks and whites."

"Why not intermarriage?"

"Almost everywhere in the United States, Ratchet, it was punishable by law for a white person and a black one to marry." Epps' voice had become bitter. "That didn't stop slave owners, when slavery was practiced, from siring kids on their female slaves. Any kid born to a slave was a slave too." Epps looked thoughtful. "But the mixing of the races was so open that in New Orleans, they had special words to describe people by percentage of black ancestry. Mulatto was one parent of each color, quadroon was one black grandparent and three white ones, octoroons had one black and seven white great-grandparents. If a person's skin was light enough, no matter their heritage, they'd straighten their hair and go north or west to pass for white. More opportunity was available that way, and it was safer too. If you was black, or any part black, you didn't have much protection under the law. If you was white, or everybody thought you was white, it was easier."

"So," said Ratchet slowly, "love, if it occurred between black and white, was dismissed. Slavery was not just enslavement of the body, but the denigration of a minority group of people from person to thing. Not a worthy recipient of love."

"Yeah, all that. Same thing applied to the Native Americans and the Asians. Same thing applies to homophobia, though that's gonna take a little longer to get rid of; people still get killed for bein' gay. Google 'Matthew Shephard.' Google 'James Byrd, Jr.' And you think about that word you just used: denigration. It means 'to make black.'"

Ratchet _rocked_.

Epps leapt out of range of falling bodies; he'd never before seen an Autobot lose balance, but he had no great desire to be underfoot when it happened the first time. "You okay, Ratchet?"

"Yes. That was a tremendous help, Robert, and I thank you, because I've just realized something. I was myself born into a minority caste on Cybertron, and everything you've just discussed was once practiced against me. Now I find myself practicing it against others, and I am deeply shamed."

Epps was taken aback. "Literally rocked your world there. You wanna share?"

Blue optics met the human's brown eyes. "No. For one thing, issues of medical confidentiality are involved. For another, I fear that you would lose respect for me because of my bigotry. For a third, sharing will not help me to rid myself of these thoughts, which I must. I may have them, but I will not be enslaved to them. I will contradict them whenever I think them. They are not appropriate, and I will no longer tolerate their presence, or their pathways, in my processor."

"Whoa, Ratch, that's pretty awesome! I don't need to know any details to tell ya that if you're gonna deal with it this way, I won't be losin' any respect for you at all, man."

"I am not a man."

Epps canted his brows up. "Dude? Comrade? Compadre?"

"Point taken." Ratchet sighed. "I should have realized that love is one of the most basic of freedoms. Either I believe in every sentient's right to freedom in every particular, or I don't, and I must. Anything else is intolerable." Ratchet began to charge up his guns. "Now, if you will excuse me, I need to blow things up for a while."

The human smiled. "Ironhide's therapy of choice," Epps said, collecting his things and donning his jacket. "Hope it works as well for you as it did for him. See you, Ratchet."

"Goodbye, Robert. Thank you for listening."

The human door shut behind Epps, and Ratchet called up his targets and began firing. Ironhide was much in his processor, and it seemed to Ratchet that his companion of many long vorns was somehow pleased for him.

While, being Ironhide, not feeling compelled in any way to share in any self-examination whatsoever.


	6. Chapter 6

The golden head tilted down to Charlotte Mearing's. "Are you okay? Is this what you want, what you need?"

"I need a moment," Charlotte said, truthfully.

The golden being stopped the gentle movement of his hand. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Optimus. This is just ... new."

Charlotte tried to tell herself that she was not used to Optimus Prime being so small. While true, that wasn't the source of the problem. His new body put her into the position of trying to make love, or rather trying to _enjoy_ making love, to a stranger.

He lay beside her on the bed, naked as she was, except he was perfect. No moles, no scars, no ley-lines of past worry etched into his face, and no fault lines of past bullet tracks on his body.

That face managed to look like his root-mode self, somehow; it must have been the proportions. The red hair and the blue eyes recalled his paint ... was it that the skin was human-colored, that light perfect gold, and not his silver?

That was part of it. She couldn't put her finger on the rest. But for all that, for all this difference, the motivating mind inside that body was Optimus'. –Why didn't that seem to matter?

It didn't matter because human women's bodies are genetically programmed not to make love with a man until they are sure he will be a good partner to raise children with, which has been a risk for almost all of human history. Her mind knew very well that this was Optimus, beloved of Charlotte. Her body, though, insisted that he was a stranger, and her body held the say-so on response.

He rose to open the curtains of their second-floor room overlooking the ocean, and in the sunlight she saw that his face wasn't totally perfect after all, that he had a few crow's feet at the edge of each eye, a set of smile creases running from nose to mouth.

She drew a deep breath. "I guess, silly as it sounds, that I'm not used to you being human."

He half-turned toward her, muscles bunching and sliding exquisitely below that perfect skin. "I'm not human, Charlotte. I'm a Cybertronian in a human alt-form, for all intents and purposes. Not a Pretender, thank Primus, that was something different. But not human."

Charlotte went inside her head, and her eyes showed it. Optimus returned to the bed (king-sized extra-long to accommodate his height of six feet nine inches, about 205 cm) and lay down beside her. He waited patiently for her, placing one hand on her hip but not otherwise intruding.

That meant he ignored this strange new body's demands, though they were perversely insistent. As a Cybertronian, he was used to being able to turn his sex drive on, and with equal ease, turn it off. This near-organic thing, though, seemed to have a mind of its own.

But Optimus was fortunate enough to have been Elita-1's lover. He was and remained very grateful to understand through her, for her, that some things should not be hurried.

He would make the assumption that such a truth did not change between species.

When Charlotte came back from wherever she had been, the silly body, as he had begun to think of it, had sulked itself into a state of not being ready to go again. Oh well; in Optimus' experience, more conversation meant that you got to know one another better, and was never wasted. He put an arm gently around Charlotte's waist and pulled her into his broad chest.

She burst into tears and clung to him.

Optimus and Charlotte: capabilities for smut together not working out so well, actually.

* * *

><p>It is a universal truth that human couples fight about money first, and sex second. Optimus and Charlotte were either half a human couple, or a very human couple, depending. But they had no need to fight about money, as they were united in mortal combat against the gubmint for it.<p>

Post-disaster, the pair were in Optimus' kitchen, one-fifth of which had been adapted for Charlotte's use. While this was proportionate to the size of the persons involved, Optimus didn't cook, no Autobot did, so all he needed was an energon dispenser and a table to sit at while he consumed the dispensed energon.

Charlotte, being a member of a biological species, had to prepare her food. Tucked into a corner of Optimus' kitchen were a microwave, convection oven, refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher, sink with garbage disposal built in, stand mixer, and food processor; cabinets held glasses, dishes, utensils, pots, pans. Humans, no matter the activity engaged in, like their Stuff.

Optimus put a grey polo and black slacks on over the meatsuit's birthday suit, and completed the outfit with black moccasins. His pedes didn't sweat, so he didn't need socks; for the same reason, he didn't need underwear. (Although he eventually asked for some, the first time tender parts of this bio-creation he rode came into contact with the inner seam of jeans.)

They hadn't said much since Charlotte had cried herself out in his arms. She'd eventually murmured, "I need to get up," and hadn't come back to bed, dressing in the bathroom.

On following her into the kitchen, he found her staring at an empty teamaker, tea canister in hand.

"Charlotte," he said tentatively at the end of thirty seconds of immobility on her part, "may I make tea for you?"

Her face crumpled, and he thought she was going to break into tears again. He took the tea from her and set it on the countertop, and gathered her back into his arms, mostly because he didn't know what else to do.

She put her head down onto his chest, right where his spark would be, and they stayed like that. "I'm sorry," she murmured.

"You've nothing to be sorry for," he said, and she raised her head , eyes brimming, to gaze into his own blue eyes. "I am very fond of you, Charlotte, and I have come to believe that you are also fond of me. This - this difficulty - is a bump in the road. We'll find out what's bothering you, and resolve it."

"And if we can't?"

"Then we will have a relationship which, while affectionate, does not encompass our sexuality," he said, with a small smile. "A friendship, still, but a friendship weathered by that acceptance. I can't deny that it will change things. But perhaps we are a little bit ahead of ourselves? It may not come to that."

"Oh, I so hope it doesn't," she said. "I am sorry, Optimus – no, hear me out," she said, as he began to protest. She picked the tea up and measured some into the basket. "I'm sorry I didn't know myself well enough to deal with this. Because this problem is not yours, it's mine, and I don't know how to resolve it."

"If there is any help I can offer, of course you have it."

She drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Thank you. You are, in many ways, the biggest person I have ever known."

He smiled, and reached quite a way down to touch her cheek. "I would be surprised if that were not literally true."

She snorted. "Not what I mean, and you know it." She went to the sink, and filled the carafe, pouring it into the heating chamber of the teapot.

"Yes. I do know that." He gathered her in, put his cheek on her hair, and they stood like that, while the teamaker chuckled and burbled behind them, until the basewide alarm went off.

"Oh, _hell_," said Charlotte Mearing, and stepped out of Optimus Prime's embrace.

* * *

><p>Ops was always tense. On good days, the ones without a team in the field, the tension came from focus. On days when there was a mission, the focus crystallized out into something like fear for the comrades who were doing the work.<p>

This day, so far both too good to be bad (no casualties) and too bad to be good (personnel still in the field), NEST folk and Charlotte Mearing herself were hunched over video feeds, frowning in concentration.

The alarm had been set off by Barricade, who did minimal damage to the base fence, was met with force before he could access med bay, and then un-obligingly vanished. Optimus Prime, Sideswipe, Ratchet, and Mirage were all looking for him without success in the Washington, DC area: searching street-by-street, and, truth be told, hoping not to find him, at least not in the crowded metropolitan area itself.

There seemed to be no black-and-white cop cars with "To Punish and Enslave" on the doors anywhere nearby; one would be conspicuous among the DC-Metro's cheery white cars with a swathe of red-and-white stripes, bisected by a thin swirling blue line, and no text other than "Metro." He could not hide and be himself, so the question was, would he give up his identity?

If he had, they were faced with a massive search effort, and a fight at the end of it.

Smokescreeen was in Ops this day, summoned to answer the question of whether Barricade would give up his chosen self. "It's unlikely, judging from what we know of him. He's a very determined mech," he said to Optimus over comm lines so that NEST personnel would also receive the information. "That usually equates to a strong investment in identity. So you're probably looking for some version of the Barricade we know. But if he's clever, he may put the black panel, and the logo he favors, on the roof of a white car."

"If we Autobots find him," Optimus rumbled, "it will probably be through our sensors." He was searching an abandoned business park, along with Sideswipe, who presently was on another floor. All the Cybertronians were streaming video feeds as they went, as were the helmet-cams of NEST personnel.

"Most likely-"

Whatever Smokey had been going to say was interrupted as Optimus' video feed jumped with noise of an explosion, tilted, slid crazily downward, and fell through a cloud of smoke to land with a jar on what appeared to be a concrete floor. The view fritzed, transmitted only electronic scramble for a moment, then steadied into a single static-laden frozen frame. It resumed operation, or seemed to, facing a grimy window set into a concrete wall.

And it did not alter.

Parts of Barricade, legs, a servo, an arm, the upper-left side of his face, made brief forays into visual range. One of a pair of stasis cuff bracelets swished through camera range on the end of its chain, then vanished as the background made a sickening-to-watch one-eighty.

Sound picked up was the grunt and clank of somebot shifting a much larger mech from one side to another, and the grate and scrape of living metal against concrete. Then their view went through another stomach-wrenching ninety-degree turn.

Charlotte thought for a brief moment that her own processor had frozen. She stared, horrified, at the vid feed, while inside her chest all its contents seemed to coagulate into a single solid lump around her heart. That heart, pounding, sent jagged waves of pain through the mass, roaring so loudly in her ears that when a pair of silver legs terminated by wheels skated into the picture, she didn't hear the string of Cybertronian curses Sideswipe snarled at Barricade.

The silver swordsman's fight with what seemed to be the last remaining functional Decepticon took place tantalizingly half-in, half-out of camera range. Legs flashing, the Autobot's sword sending a single beam of light into the camera (which blinded it momentarily), Sideswipe and Barricade fought around Optimus' prone body, and metaphorically over it as well. The clang of metal and sizzle of Sides' blade, the zip and zing of his wheels, the thunderous metallic crashes of Barricade's blows, along with various profanities in Cybertronian from both, filled the audio channel.

Ratchet's arrival meant that Barricade hastily disengaged. Sideswipe pursued him briefly, then appeared in Ratchet's vid feed.

Ratchet snapped, "Get those stasis cuffs off him!" to the silver warrior, and then continued to examine Optimus, the camera pointed in the wrong direction to pick up anything the two were doing. Ratchet's vid feed, however, showed Optimus down, offlined, an enormous dent in one side of his helm, shoulder armor flattened, and an even larger dent over his chest.

When Ratchet rolled the Prime to his back, the view from Optimus' feed did another barf-inducing one-eighty ... and then, as Ratchet rebooted Optimus' systems, the view went to black, to flare-out, to normal.

Charlotte found she had been gripping the arms of her chair so tightly that the memory foam had her fingerprints in it, and that tears were streaming down her face. She steadied herself, somehow, and said over the comm line, "Ratchet, will you require transport for your patient?"

The medic's attention was still fully engaged with Optimus' systems. He burst into a Cybertronian rant which left smiles on all his fellow Autobots' faceplates in Ops and sounded to the humans like a sackful of cooking ware thrown down concrete stairs. Then he switched to English to snap, "Give me another five breem and I'll know!"

Charlotte sent the orders that readied their largest flatbed, a driver, and several acres of canvas, to roll. Then one of her assistants (the one she liked least) handed her a cup of tea, and she realized that Smokescreen was staring at her with an unnerving Ratchet-like intensity; so, in fact, was Seymour Simmons.

She drank the tea, which was sweeter than she liked. But her body needed that simple carb, and by the time the cup was empty she was less a disembodied consciousness. She could feel her feet again, for instance.

She'd have to rethink who was going to be sentenced to reading those 20K pages for Ratchet. She rose briskly from her chair, said, "Graham, you have the conn; Smokescreen, with me," and walked out of Ops.

Seymour Simmons, his mouth in a straight, grim line, and sadness in his eyes, moved to her empty chair, and donned the headset.


	7. Chapter 7

"No, of course it's not unusual, Director," Smokescreen said. "I imagine that anyone who sees and can't prevent injury to a loved one has that reaction."

In his office, he smiled down at Charlotte Mearing, seated in the human's chair on his desk. (He had taken an online course or twenty-some in human psychology, but still refused to have a couch.) "You're going to be all right, Charlotte. And Ratchet has just commed with the news that Optimus will have no lasting problems from that IED Barricade used on him. Wheeljack and Perceptor are at the site now, doing tests so that we can figure out how he created it."

Charlotte put her aching forehead into her hand. "All I want at the moment is to be in Optimus' presence again."

"I understand," the base psychologist said with a smile. "Go find a place where you feel like you can tremble for five minutes. Not your office. Outside, with your feet on the ground."

"Where did you learn _that_?" Charlotte said, descending the stairs leading from the human's chair to the floor.

Smokescreen smiled more widely. "Human scientists have learned a very great deal about the workings of the mind in a very short time," he said pleasantly, walking her to the door of his office; he never carried a patient - mixed signals, and all that. "But what your shamans knew is true as well. Their knowledge is only beginning to be rediscovered. Go tremble, with your feet on the ground."

* * *

><p>The place Charlotte Mearing found to tremble with her feet on the ground was a small outcropping of grass that had subsided below the level of the paving around the base. She was not the only one who knew of it, of course; it had been furnished with a bench about three human butts wide, the short path leading to it graveled, and the ground under it stabilized: all work done by Ironhide, for which she remembered approving the supplies request. The need for a place to tremble with your feet on the ground was an everyday requirement for NEST personnel and their families.<p>

Her tears started up again. Charlotte, who had left her various bags behind her in Ops, sat on the bench, looked out over the river, let them run through her mascara and down her cheeks without giving a single solitary hot goddamn that they were doing so, and trembled.

Odd how calming that was, she was thinking as the shaking subsided, when steps on the gravel raised her head.

Sarah Lennox stood there, looking as lost as Charlotte felt.

Charlotte stood. The worst of her pain had been assuaged; she could leave this sanctuary to someone who needed it more. "Come on," she said. "I'm just leaving."

"No, don't – don't go on my account," Sarah said, coming to sit at the other end of the bench, as Charlotte moved out of the middle of it.

"Do you come here every time your husband is on mission?"

"Here, or someplace like it. Just to shake, and be grateful he's coming back to me, and ... and be angry that he values this country so highly he risks his life, and Annabelle's and my future, for it on a regular basis." The small blond stared out over the water. "If he didn't do that, he wouldn't be Will. I could no more ask him to quit than ... than fly."

Charlotte noted that Sarah had begun to cry, too. She tentatively reached out a hand to pat the other woman on the shoulder, and Sarah turned into the touch and wrapped her arms around Charlotte, sobbing into her shoulder.

Charlotte embraced Sarah, and let her own tears return.

Some timeless time later, they moved out of the embrace. Sarah wiped her tears, and pulled a pack of tissues out of her pocket, offering Charlotte one. "We've only got _right now_," the blond said, doing mop-up duty on herself. "I never forget that."

Charlotte stared at her, stained and crumpled tissue in one hand. "I won't either, ever again," she said. "Thank you, Mrs. Lennox."

"Sarah, please. 'Mrs. Lennox' is my mother-in-law." Sarah carefully put her tissue in a pocket.

"I'm Charlotte."

"Charlotte. This your first time here?"

"Yes. I've known about it, in fact I cleared the requisition for the supplies used to make it safe."

"Ironhide did that work at night, did you know that? So that if someone needed to use it, they could."

"He was quite the person. Gruff as anything, didn't want you to think for a minute that he cared."

"But he cared. Oh, he cared."

"You were closer to him than most of the rest of us."

"Yes. Both of us, Will and I, were. Did you know that Annabelle learned to say his full name, just before - just before."

"She must miss him terribly."

"As only a four-year-old can. The hardest part is, she won't remember him very well, so I'm glad we took pictures." She wrinkled up her nose. "Even though most of them are classified, and we have to apply to get access to them, and then give them back, and sign an affidavit that we have not had them copied. Later on, we'll be able to talk about him to her. Right now, though, it's too much. We huddle together and cry, and Annabelle asks 'Why doesn't 'Hide come to see me?' and 'Where did he go?' and we don't have an answer."

Charlotte didn't know what to say to that, so she stamped down the terrible feeling of loss it shoved at her and settled for, "I'm sorry." She stood. "I'm afraid I have to get back. Will you be all right if I leave, or would you care to come with me?"

"Oh, I'll be all right here." The blond gave a watery sniffle. "Thanks for the shoulder to weep on."

"Happy to be of help. — You told me something today that's going to change the rest of my life."

Sarah Lennox blinked at her. "Oh?"

"We've only got right now, you said. You know what, Sarah? That's all any of us have. So I'm going to go grab 'right now' by the neck, and make the most of it."

A small, pale, wintery smile crossed Sarah Lennox' face. "You and me both," she said.

* * *

><p>Charlotte Mearing stayed in her office only long enough to sign an order to release all of the Lennox' photographs of Ironhide to them permanently, and went to see Optimus while he still lay on a medical berth.<p>

"I don't like to tell you not to stay long, Charlotte," Ratchet said, "but right now, the less processing he has to do, the better. That bomb of Barricade's jolted a few connections loose, and he needs to be still and quiet to let them reunite."

They were just inside the medbay door. "I'll see him later if you think that would be best, Ratchet," Charlotte said, a new calmness settling into her.

The medic eyed her curiously; she couldn't be aware of the tentacles of bond-energy reaching for her, nor that her own aura was reaching for Optimus, but he sure as the Pit was.

He wouldn't have known what an "aura" was unless one had bitten him in the aft, until Sam's present girlfriend introduced him to the concept. He'd known humans had EM fields, relatively tiny as all bio-creatures' were, but he hadn't known they could perceive them.

And whatever his opinion of that bond (or of himself for missing it, when it had been Smokescreen who commed him with that information just as he knelt beside Optimus' prostrate form), it would not be good for his patient to break those tenuous connections right now ... always assuming they could be broken. "What might be best for him," he said, "is if you came and simply sat with him for a while. Don't speak, if you can help it. Can you give him fifteen minutes?"

"Not a problem. Longer if needed."

"Let's start with fifteen; it wouldn't be good to tire him. I'll lift you to his chest. Put your head on his spark casing."

"Very well." She pulled off her high heels.

In a skirt suit and not caring very much about that, Charlotte Mearing stretched out on Optimus Prime's chest. For the first fifteen minutes of the rest of her life, she lay with her head over his spark, bathing in his EM field, and sharing hers with him.

Ratchet cast an optic over the Prime's monitors, then smiled and left. The bond was still so new that Charlotte's presence now for this short period would satiate it for a day or so, perhaps, leaving Optimus better able to rest.

So new, but not so fragile as he might have hoped.


	8. Chapter 8

"Director," Ratchet said calmly, meeting her at the door to medbay the next morning. "Thank you for coming."

"Optimus?" she said, looking in the mech's direction, and even with the simple utterance of the name, he could see her spark dance in the bond, generating tendrils that reached across his medbay to connect to the Prime. He also knew she'd received his request to join him with trepidation, fearing that he had bad news.

Well, he did. Probably not the bad news she was fearing, but bad enough, and likely worse. "Presently, he's offline, resting. He's doing fine, almost completely recovered."

She sighed, relief flooding her. "Your office?"

"Yes, that would be best." He offered her his hand.

This morning, he noted, she had come to work wearing another suit jacket, but matched to pants instead of yesterday's skirt. The place she got it from had probably missed a real selling point when it failed to market the outfit as "Perfect for lying on your loved one's spark if he is a thirty-foot-tall alien NBE!"

In the office, Ratchet folded his servos and waited for her to ascend the stairs which led to the human platform that held a desk and chair. She sat neatly at it, folded her own hands, and gazed at him.

He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. "Director, how much do you know about the bonds which form between us?"

"They are lifelong. There are no bonded pairs except for the twins among you at present, and theirs is a spark-split, instead of a spark-joined, bond. The Aerialbots' gestalt is something different. That's really all I know."

"Were you aware," he said, and she understood suddenly that he was feeling his way into a minefield, "that both Sideswipe and Sunstreaker have thirty points added to their triage score whenever either is injured?"

"You'll have to explain what a triage score is, Ratchet."

"It determines who gets treated first. The more life-threatening injuries are, the higher the score. If the medical team is overwhelmed with casualties after a battle and has to choose who to treat first, the highest scores get priority."

He wasn't going to tell her about the _other_ triage sort, the one that, among those with similarly grave injuries, gave preference to those with a better chance of survival.

"I see." She said it so calmly that he was reminded, sharply, that this woman could order others to their deaths, and had herself been sent into situations she did not expect to survive. A triage score or something very like it was probably no stranger to her, although he was certain the CIA called it something else.

Ratchet sighed for the necessity of triage scores at all, and continued, "Those thirty points get the twins treated before anyone who isn't actively bleeding out or sliding into cascade failure. They get the points because, if I lose either Sunstreaker or Sideswipe, I can count on losing the other within a vorn, as a result of the severance of their bond."

"And is this true of all bonds, or only spark-split bonds?"

"All bonds."

She nodded, looking somewhat puzzled.

"Director," he said, "both Smokescreen and I have seen evidence that a bond is forming between you and Optimus Prime."

Charlotte Mearing felt the bottom crash out of her world, and Ratchet watched her energy form itself into a dark-red fist aimed directly at him. "You had half-assed bigoted reasons for discouraging our relationship, Ratchet, but you didn't tell me that? You _didn't bother_ to tell me that his death could result from our pursuit of that relationship? Knowing that I have less than a vorn left, in your terms, _you didn't bother to tell me _that when I die he will too? You _son_ of a _bitch_!"

He spread his servos. "I had no idea the formation of a bond between species was possible, Director. Everything I know told me that yours would be an ephemeral relationship."

Had she had something to hand, Charlotte would very likely have thrown it at the healer. She settled for repeating more quietly, "You son of a bitch." He did not need to research the epithet on the web to flush.

Charlotte watched whatever was going on inside her head for a very long thirty seconds, and then said flatly, "You're sure there is a bond?"

"Yes, I am."

"And it's too late to break it. I'd suicide if necessary, to keep him safe."

Ratchet opticked her in surprise. "I had no idea you would make such a sacrifice, Director. But fortunately for you, yes, it is too late. Sitting here, I can see that tendrils of the bond-energy from him are reaching for you just as certainly as yours reach for him. If you died, those tendrils would reach out endlessly, leaching his life-force as they dissipated upon not finding you, and that's what would kill him. Eventually. I supervised that process in medical school. It's not pleasant for healer or patient."

Charlotte said nothing for a while, then raised her head to make optic contact with Ratchet (although her eyes were streaming with tears) and say bluntly,"Then we have one option left, the one we discarded at the outset: develop a long-lived frame to house my spark, and transfer me into it permanently. You've got a limited time to make that work, Ratchet. About forty years at the very most, with the life I've led. Plan for half that." She had reached the bottom of the stairs, and strode across his desk to his offered hand. "If a better solution occurs to you, Ratchet, bring it to me immediately. That's an order."

He picked her up. "Yes, Madam Director."

"'Charlotte' to you, healer."

This from a being presently clutching his thumb, so that she would not fall to her death from his servo! You had to give these humans points for nerve, if not for simple common sense. "Yes, Charlotte."

He reached the med bay door and set her down, watching as she disappeared into the distance, small, erect, and, even at a distance, forbidding.

Well. Ratchet had disobeyed a direct order, almost, and had completed about half the work of creating a frame that might support a human. He'd enjoyed the challenges, and expected to continue to do so.

He had what he wanted, and was astonished to find that his victory held no joy in it.

He went to feed the guinea pig, which at this point was staying a term break with him.

* * *

><p>The next day, Optimus was released from Ratchet's clutches.<p>

Charlotte had cleared her schedule at Ratchet's request. She would go to their quarters with him, and spend the rest of the day there.

After all, they only had right now.

Charlotte did not allow him to carry her. He could have, without any damage to himself, but she chose to stride beside him, his enormous foot landing beside her with a deafening metallic "Thoom!" once for every eight to ten of her own strides.

He sent the code that opened the door to their quarters on ahead, and they went in and shut it securely behind them.

"I want to lie on your chest," Charlotte said. "We need to talk."

He nodded. "Yes, we do."

They went to his berth room, and arranged themselves.

Ratchet had forbidden the use of the meatsuit for three orn, roughly five days, so Pat was in medbay, getting both a checkup and a holiday.

Charlotte kicked off her heels beside the door, so that they weren't in the traffic pattern. If she stepped on them she would likely break her neck. If Optimus did, she'd end up with a lovely pair of very dense and well-cushioned Manolo Blahnik flats which had begun life as four-inch platform heels.

She curled up on his spark. He lifted a servo to cradle her, and they stayed like that for five or ten eternities.

Then Charlotte sighed. "Optimus. Did Ratchet talk to you about the bond?"

"Yes, he did. He was not pleased, but most of his displeasure was aimed at himself."

"It's both terrifying, and wonderful. I gave him an order to develop a simulacrum with a life expectancy similar to your own that I can move into, and stay there."

"But that will cause big, ugly trouble, he told me."

"My friend. The facts are these: if it comes to big, ugly trouble, trouble so big and so ugly I'm afraid of it, and the alternative is losing the last Prime of Cybertron, and my friend, I find the big ugly trouble is not so big, not so ugly, and not even so troublesome." She sighed again. She would _not_ cry. (For one thing, she didn't have any tissues, and she felt rusting one's beloved to be bad form.) "In my job, I am expected to serve two masters. I have to pursue what is best for your people, unless their benefit comes at my country's cost. In this matter, ensuring your safety brings my country the benefit of the continued, and exponentially extended, services of an experienced agent. Humans have a career span of about a half-vorn, normally. I'll be able to give my country multiple vorns of service, and may never need to collect a pension."

His enormous hand came up, and stroked her arm with a fingertip, very gently. "That is of great benefit to me as well, Charlotte."

"It will still be a lot of big ugly trouble, Optimus. Publicity, nastiness, crazies outside the gate."

He went very quiet. Then he said, "And on a personal level, if you decide to do this, you will lose those you love, Charlotte. All of them."

"Not all of them," she said, and lay listening to his fuel pump for a moment. "But it's true I will become a member of a society whose language I may never be able to speak, and beyond yourself, I haven't made many friends among your people. That's a lot of loneliness to contemplate." She paused. "Or at least, that's what it looks like from here. The reality may be somewhat different."

He made the noise in his chest she knew was a chuckle, stifled. "Reality usually is. But Ratchet also presented another scenario to me."

"Oh?"

"Chemical neutralization of the bond. It's possible, though somewhat dangerous."

She raised her head to look into those bright-blue optics. "Aren't we doing our best to keep you out of danger? My transfer will give your people, who need you, the benefit of your leadership for a good long time. If I found it painful to lose you, the loss to them would be incalculable." She lay quiet for a while, then raised her head again to make eye-to-optic contact and say carefully, "If you decide to try chemical dissolution, Optimus, I won't raise any objections on my own part. If Ratchet has underestimated the danger to you, and the process kills you, _I_ will kill _him_."

He chuckled again, outright this time. "My bright, particular, and very fierce star," he said, and cradled her close. "Please don't kill him until it becomes absolutely necessary to do so."

She laid her head back down on his spark. "Okay. That I can promise."


	9. Chapter 9

"You will have to beat me to it," Ratchet said, no smile on his lip-plates, to Charlotte Mearing, who had just informed him of the consequences his failure would carry. Both were stiff with fury.

"All right, did no one hear me?" said Optimus Prime. "I said I would not undertake dissolution of the bond unless no other option presents itself. Can you two un-bristle at each other, please, and we will continue this discussion in civilized fashion?"

Ratchet literally shook his fluffed plating into place; Optimus realized that he hadn't seen anyone do that since Bumblebee reached his sparkling upgrades.

The steam coming out of Charlotte's ears lost speed. "Yes, if we have to."

"What she said," Ratchet said, with a jerk of his head in Charlotte's direction.

Slowly and with great deliberation, Optimus Prime pounded his helm on his desk three times. "Ratchet. Charlotte. I need to have you two talk to one another about this! Civilly! I can't order either one of you to perform an act so grave without your full consent! So get there! And don't leave my office until you have!"

He rose to his full twenty-eight feet, and very carefully did not slam the door behind him as he walked out of his office. They watched him transform and speed off, Sideswipe trailing, to the firing range.

"Cathartic detonation," Ratchet murmured.

"Much as you might like that, I won't consent to letting you blow me up."

"What? No! I didn't mean – " He stopped when he saw the smile creeping across her face. "Not nice, Director."

"Ratchet, I think you and I have reached the end of 'nice' with each other. We have a mutual concern: Optimus' well-being. What is our most direct route to ensuring it, now and in the future?"

Sheesh. Maybe these creatures weren't so crazy after all. "Finding a way to support Optimus' sparkmate outside a fragile, aging human body."

"Thank you for putting it that way. But you're right. So where are you in that process, and what do you need to bring it to completion?"

"I have prolonged the lifespan of a guinea pig. Pity the creature can't tell us what it thinks about that."

She took the last sip of her latte and crunched the paper cup into a ball in her fist. "There are ways to tell. Does it use its hamster wheel? Is it eating and excreting? If you take blood samples, are they normal?"

"Director, I prolonged its life by crafting a new body for it. It's about a hundred and forty, in human terms, and I've hooked the hamster wheel up to a generator because otherwise it runs until the bearings smoke, and wears out a wheel about once every two weeks. The damn' thing is almost solely responsible for us being off the grid at this point."

"Okay. So that worked. How much more complicated can a human being be?"

"Well, not much more, chemically. That's not the problem, it's how the brain works. The brain is of course a neural network, but the question of personality, what for us is usually expressed as 'programming,' is complex. I can make a frame that would be run by you in a very short period of time." _because, contrary to your express order, I already have one lying on a table in my secret lab_, "but the real problem lies in getting _you_ inside it."

"Is that the only solution to the problem? Could you transplant the brain itself, hook it up to be the controller, keep it alive in a, a 'frame'?"

"In order: I don't know, probably yes, possibly yes, and I don't know."

"How long will you need for research?"

"Give me two weeks. No, give me three. One person I need to speak with won't be back from vacation for another fifteen days."

"Is there a possibility of transferring the, the ..." she closed her eyes, opened them, frowned. "I don't have the vocabulary. I almost don't have the concepts. 'The electrical pattern of the personality' might be what I am trying to say."

"Yes, possibly." The medic's eyes were faraway. "I would have to analyze the nature of the electrical currents your brain produces ..."

Charlotte finished making some notes that no one else would ever be able to understand, and said, "If we add that kind of research, how long will you need?"

"Why don't we make it four weeks. I'll report in on the first issues in three, and have, at the very least, some ideas of the questions to ask about the second in four."

"Fair enough. What - " she was interrupted by the flat _clack_ of a door being released.

"That slagger locked us in here together!" Charlotte Mearing said of her beloved.

* * *

><p>"So, this is my version of Pat," Charlotte Mearing said, walking around the top of a medbay berth.<p>

The figure on it was not quite Sideswipe's height, had pedes instead of wheels, and was painted all over in primer gray.

"Yes," said Ratchet. "Today's the day we do the test run."

"Test run?"

"Yes. The neural interfaces work, we proved that. The transfer works, we proved that. Today's the day we put them both together."

"All right. Where do you want me, Ratchet?"

He offered her his hand, carried her to another berth, where a human-sized bed and a helmet lay waiting for her.

The silver helmet felt odd; it didn't quite balance comfortably on Charlotte's head. It was about the same size and weight as a motorcycle helmet, but had leads running from its surface to the spark chamber, if you wanted to call it that, of the primer-gray figure. Ratchet had, however, created the bed she lay on for comfort, and the helmet fit easily into a half-round depression, leaving the neck vertebrae supported, but held straight.

Charlotte Mearing closed her eyes, and relaxed ...

... and opened her eyes in a slightly-different place.

"Charlotte," said Ratchet, "are you in there?"

Her mouth felt dry, but no saliva accumulated when she worked it. "I, I think so, Ratchet," she said, hearing her voice, but somehow _not_ her voice, echo oddly in her own ears. She wasn't articulating well, either, what she'd actually said was closer to "Hi thing kso, Arrchet."

He loomed into her view, and said, "Can you sit up?"

Whatever handwavium he had used for the thought-to-motion interface, it was as lightweight and imperceptible as that of her original body. She didn't have to think, "Contract belly muscles," she simply sat up.

The shudder, rasp, and creak of metal a human heard when any Transformer moved was inaudible from inside the living metal, just as the inside of any human normally makes little to no noise to the resident thereof.

She made it upright, pivoted ninety degrees, and swung her legs over the edge of the medical berth. And, that done, she grinned at her medic. "We got this far!"

"Indeed we did. Now we have some tests to run."

The tests, she realized four weary hours later, were the reason he had asked to do this on a Saturday. She had walked, run, somersaulted, done a field sobriety test (or anyway that's what it reminded her of), performed her six most-favorite yoga asanas, signed her name, copied a few Cybertronian characters, learned to aim and discharge a firearm in a body that was not at all like her old one, and memorized the 17,292-character Cybertronian alphabet.

"I really hope I can retain this memory," Charlotte said, looking at Ratchet. "This was easy." (As in, look at pictograph containing a character and the English transliterations of its sound and its designation, open a new file, commit that information to it, save, and close the file. Done, yours forever.)

"We'll see, won't we?" he replied. He could not, with any accuracy, say what he had transferred from one frame (biological entity) to another (non-biological entity), and therefore wasn't willing even to guess whether these memories would take root in the meat jelly.

"We have one test left. I've arranged for transport for both of us; we'll be going to Nellis Air Force Base."

"Nellis? Why?"

"If transfer is not complete, Charlotte, the distance involved will tell us that."

"Oh. Have you reason to believe it isn't?"

"No. Proving it one way or the other without the travel would involve Optimus, and at this point, I'd rather not."

Charlotte would have liked to grumble a bit: this was going to make hash not only of her Saturday but her Sunday too. She said nothing, however, merely downed the energon cube he handed her; it tasted much different to her Cybertronian frame than it smelled to her human shell.

He handed the medbay off to Jolt and First Aid, including supervision of Charlotte's other self, and went with her to the chopper pad.

* * *

><p>Ratchet's job during the flight to Nellis was to talk, incessantly, to Charlotte Mearing. This he did.<p>

"Ratchet," she said at one point, "stop. You've talked now for two solid hours. Just stop talking!"

"Not possible, Charlotte. You have to continue giving me responses until you can't, if that happens."

She scowled.

But over Missouri, it did. Charlotte's face smoothed, her responses grew slower and less distinct, and she slumped, finally, against the tiedowns used to keep her against one wall of the chopper, unable to make response any longer. Ratchet commed the pilot, "Abort mission. What's our distance from base?"

The pilot gave him the numbers.

Staring at Charlotte's blank face, Ratchet scowled. That wasn't as far as he'd hoped they'd get. More to find out; more to do once he had.

To his surprise, Charlotte "woke" over West Virginia.

"I didn't just fall asleep, did I?" she said, blinking at Ratchet.

"No. Your consciousness can't maintain the link over distance."

She threw her helm back; its metal clanked against the side of the chopper. "Not good."

He shrugged. "Look at it as information. We know a great deal more than we did this morning."


	10. Chapter 10

"And," Ratchet said pleasantly, "since a general anaesthetic is inherently dangerous, and I have the greatest amount of experience in treating humans, I will stay here, and Jolt is going with you."

"Oh? All right. I haven't had the chance to talk with him very much, so that'll be interesting," Charlotte said.

She was spending more and more time in her - her - Ratchet gave up, and said "alt frame" to himself. She said that was because its memory was perfect, and her human body's was not.

That was fine with Ratchet. It meant that he didn't have to line-feed the frame. And when Charlotte "wore" it overnight, whoever was on shift simply monitored her human body on one channel, and her Cybertronian frame on another. Charlotte Mearing, in stereo.

Whoever was on monitor duty also got a free ringside seat to quite a lot of hot Cybertronian sex. Lucky mech.

"Remember," Ratchet cautioned her, "you're to do as much talking as listening. He has to be sure you're responding."

"Last time I conked out over Missouri, didn't I?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Means _he_ can talk to _me_ until we reach Missouri. After that, _I_ have to talk to _him_." She grinned at him, and went out the door, and Ratchet went back to worrying.

The bond tendrils between Charlotte, in either of her frames, and Optimus had thickened markedly since they began to have Cybertronian-style sex with one another while she was in alt-frame. It was too late to dissolve the bond. He had to succeed at this. Had to.

* * *

><p>"Are we over Missouri yet?" Charlotte Mearing asked over the comms Ratchet had installed for her. Jolt gave her a quick look, and a smile.<p>

"Ma'am," the pilot sent, "we passed Missouri an hour ago."

* * *

><p>"Do you want to try something different tonight?" Optimus Prime said.<p>

Honeymoon phase, where every stretch of private time shows you something new about your beloved.

"Sure. What?"

"You be the spike, and I'll be the valve, and then we'll try it the other way around. Afterward, we'll tell each other which we liked better."

"Okay," Charlotte said.

It wasn't precisely a big mistake, although they wouldn't know that for a while yet.

And Optimus' reports were more informative than Charlotte's. She figured that was because, however it came about, she simply liked the mech, liked being with him whether, technically, he was being "him" or he was being "her."

Although that spike experience? She could get to like that.

* * *

><p>"Oh no," Charlotte Mearing said calmly. "My human shell still exists. It will until it dies. We've researched the laws, and that's what has to happen, unless I wish to expose the Cybertronians who have helped me to achieve this remarkable transformation to charges of murder and abuse of a corpse."<p>

The President of the United States scowled at her. So did the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Prime Ministers of Japan and the United Kingdom, and the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Some of them did this via satellite.

"But you," said the Secretary-General to Charlotte, "the being to whom I am speaking, you will survive this."

"That is Ratchet's best guess."

"Ratchet. Who is Ratchet?"

"My Chief Medical Officer," Optimus said. Seated beside Charlotte's alt-form, he was not holding her hand; both of them were sitting straight, arms and legs not crossed, hands clasped in front of them. Nothing was there to be read from their body language. Two professionals, who happened to be 'facing each other senseless at every opportunity.

The president of the Kuomintang rattled off something in his own tongue. Optimus frowned, and answered him in the same language.

The translators in the room all gasped, and then the persons to whom the translations were forwarded all gasped.

Charlotte said, "Really, Mister Chairman, I don't comment on your sex life, and I don't expect you to comment on mine." She waited until the murmurs of shock had died down, then continued, "What should truly be under discussion here is the remarkable discovery that my friends and I have made: that a human consciousness can be decanted from its original body into another receptacle. This will, if all of you allow it, have intense repercussions for those presently trapped in a body that does not work well. Arthritis, diabetes, congestive heart failure, paralysis, blindness, locked-in syndrome: all can be a thing of the past. New lives await those who suffer from them, but all that glorious possibility rests in your hands."

The Secretary-General, a man known to be quite religious, said, "You have taken upon yourselves the powers of a god."

"Indeed," Optimus said benignly, "and since the gods have seen fit to share those powers with us, help us to spread the benefits of that power around the world."

The man shook his head, and rose. "Immortality should remain beyond our grasp."

"It has," Optimus said. "Cybertronians are long-lived by your standards, but not immortal. The bodies we offer wear out, just as do your own, and our own; those bodies we make available to you have a normal human lifespan of seventy years, more or less. They are biological constructs, and their lifespan improves with good care. Therefore, how long they live is up to the individual inhabitant. They will, however, die eventually. We all remain subject to the gods, Mr. Secretary, whatever each of us perceives those gods to be."

The Secretary-Chairman sat back down. "Very well," he said, and opened a new door into humanity's future with those two words.

* * *

><p>Ratchet rose from recharge one morning a week later to find 732,438 e-mails in his in-box. The news had apparently gotten out.<p>

He sighed, and began to sort them. The 228,472 death threats were, as always, forwarded to the FBI; 238,383 requests for body transfer were forwarded to the medical board (237,914 of them would be turned down summarily, as they were filed for cosmetic purposes); the 113, 057 threats to, or requests to save, his immortal soul the base chaplain said she would take care of, so he forwarded them to her. He wondered briefly if she knew what she had gotten into; it was likely she'd have a literal million of the things by the end of the week.

He discarded 151,968 offers of Viagra, approvals for a credit card, surgical vision correction, surgical enhancement (or depletion) of this, that, or the other, and burial insurance. Oh, and some _stuff _which apparently kept your pet's teeth clean and healthy, but the guinea pig didn't seem to need that.

His in-box now empty, Ratchet got a cube from the dispenser in the common area, and ambled toward his med bay.

A roar went up as he left one building to access another. He stopped, dead, and opticked the crowd gathered around the gate to the Autobots' compound. They began to chant and thrust badly-made signs up and down in the air.

"What the frag is going on?" said Charlotte Mearing, arriving beside him.

"You've got me," Ratchet replied. "I can't even read the signs."

What was it, Charlotte wondered, that left the impassioned so illiterate? But she shrugged, and said, "I'm going to go see what they want."

"Think that's wise?"

"No, I think it's necessary." She turned toward her assistants. "You guys stay here, okay?"

"Yes, Director," they chorused.

She went toward the gate. The roar increased, and then, as it became apparent that she was in fact headed toward them, the protestors all fell silent.

"Good morning," she said pleasantly. "I'm Charlotte Mearing, Director of this facility. What seems to be the problem?"

"That's a human name," one of them shouted, "and you're not a human!"

"I was born a human. As a human, I served the CIA for 30 years. When I transplanted my consciousness into this body, I had to satisfy that organization that I continued to be who I said I was."

"Why should we believe you?" shouted another one.

"I've no idea. Recordings and transcriptions of the hearing at which I was adjudged to be Charlotte Mearing are available under the Freedom of Information Act, document number 574298726-58.961. Believe that, instead."

There was a silence. Then Charlotte smiled at them, or at any rate bared quite a few denta, and said, "Is that all? I'm quite busy this morning."

"Abomination!" shouted someone in the back of the crowd.

"My good woman, the notion that the earth revolves about the sun, instead of the opposite, the horseless carriage, and the use of electricity have all been judged 'abominations' over the last six hundred years or so. What they turned out to be were leaps forward in science that eventually benefitted all of mankind." She smiled again. "Now, will you excuse me? I have meetings out the wazoo today, and most of them are to see who else gets to benefit from this new technology."

One of the scruffier protestors pulled a Glock out of his pocket, and fired three shots at her. They clanged harmlessly off her chestplates, and she stepped over the fence, plucked the gun from the man's hand, and bent the barrel in a half-circle before the MPs outside the gate could converge on him.

"That was a very silly thing to do," she said, handing it back. "You've just complicated your own life endlessly, and you didn't damage me at all."

The protestor took his new expensive paperweight from her, rolled his eyes back in his head, and fainted.

Charlotte made very sure he didn't hit his head on the pavement, and then stood back and let the MPs do their thing, and the Metro police force do its own.

The prosecutor said later that he was never sure how he convicted the man of attempted murder, because the lab wasn't able to fire the gun for comparison purposes. He had plenty of eyewitnesses, though, even after the ten-year fight to get Charlotte recognized as a human being, and thus capable of having a murder attempted against her.

And if Charlotte was a "human" being, then every Cybertronian was too, and entitled to the protection of the legal system.

The law wasn't an ass, precisely; it has always been slow to expand its definitions.


	11. Chapter 11

"Are you sure you're ready for this?" Ratchet said.

"Ratchet, I'm as ready as I can be." Nonetheless, Charlotte Mearing's servo tightened around Optimus Prime's, and his tightened back.

"If I've gotten this wrong ..." Ratchet stared at the pair, who would both die if he had; he had felt their pump rates elevate, and knew them to be as nervous as he..

"Ratchet," said Optimus Prime, "I absolve you of all responsibility for this on my part."

Charlotte said, "I do too. Not your fault. And this isn't me any more. I haven't even been to see her for what, a quarter-vorn? And we have to know. She could die any day, Ratchet. So just ... pull the plug."

Charlotte's human body had in fact been neglected for that quarter-vorn. Having no one resident to take her for five-mile runs, Krav Maga training, or twice-weekly yoga classes, she had gotten slack, and malnourished in several separate ways since tube feeding isn't perfectly nutritious, which eventually resulted in a sort of thin, flabby grayness about her. She looked a lot older than her sixty-three years.

She had been harvested of everything that was useable. What was left was ... left.

Charlotte in her other body had been to the Moon, and to Mars. She was independent of the body in the bed, or at least Ratchet, muttering incantations under his breath, was as sure as he could be that she was. He powered down the life-support system.

Optimus, his digits twined about Charlotte's, squeezed a little. She squeezed back. If she and Ratchet were both wrong ... they'd find out shortly.

Ten minutes after the heart stopped, there were no brainwaves left.

Ten minutes after that, Charlotte smiled at Optimus. "I guess we're good to go," she said.

"Well, Charlotte, you have here a wonderful opportunity. You can attend your own funeral," Ratchet said, as they embraced.

"What would I want to do that for?" she asked. "I lived in that body for forty-some odd years. I've said good-bye to it. Why don't we just burn what's left, and not tell anyone?"

"Because the religious right, who tend to be neither," said Ratchet, who had learned a thing or six (and not just about transferring consciousness) in the last quarter-vorn, "would descend upon us crying murder and howling for blood. Tell you what, though, I'll put her into the fridge and get a crematory permit. That do you?"

"Ratchet," said Charlotte Mearing, "that would be perfect."

When the day came, she threw an "I'm Getting Fired" party for a select few whose sense of humor was as warped as her own.

Ratchet removed the monitors he had installed into her systems, and she and Optimus ... you don't even want to know.

Well, you probably do, but the writer doesn't want to tell you.

Initiate your imagination module, and have a good time.

Whatever you come up will be not-even-close to the truth, since either of them could enact any gender role to be found on Earth, and a couple that were known only to Cybertronians. —Let's just leave it at that.

* * *

><p>"Well," said Ratchet, who had asked for a meeting among himself, Optimus Prime, and Charlotte Mearing, "you two continue to surprise me."<p>

"How so, my friend?" asked Optimus.

"When we began this odyssey," the medic said, folding his arms and leaning his elbows on his desk, "I told you I thought such a relationship unnatural. It's not; I was wrong. And it's a good thing I can say that, because if I couldn't, these," he slid two printouts of their recent scans across to them, "would blow my little processor wide open."

They looked at them, picking up the flimsy sheets and turning them this way and that, looking for clues. Then two pairs of blue optics looked at him for explanation.

"Congratulations," Rachet said. "You're sparked. Both of you."


End file.
